New Legends

THQ?s epic Xbox action/adventure has a lot going for it?and a lot going against it. One side has to come out victorious.

New Legends is a game at war with itself. On one front, hero Sun Soo and his allies struggle against the endless hordes of the evil warlord Xao Gon in an epic action/adventure; on another, great ideas clash headlong with lame execution in a grand struggle for gameplay dominance. But the question isn?t who will win? The question is will you play long enough to find out?

Yin
Fighting for the League of Things That Are Really Cool: a great manga-inspired ?ancient future China? setting; intuitive, simple to pick-up dual analog controls; loads of enemies to battle; a huge arsenal of stylin? weapons with fantastic moves and the added ability to wield a different one in each hand; epic battle whooshes, clashes, and other such sound effects; and a free PC game?style camera that gives you freedom to view your epic clashes from virtually any angle.

Yang
Fighting for the Legion of Suck: simple graphics and awfully flat environment textures that look like they belong on a Dreamcast; jittery, glitchy animation and an inconsistent frame rate; wonky collision detection; unclear mission objectives that leave you lost and confused; and really stupid A.I.-controlled allies that fight all right, but tend to fall off cliffs when they?re supposed to be leading you to your next goal. And the ?free? camera is both a blessing and a curse since it tends to leave you with less-than-desirable angles ?til you step in and manually remedy the situation, and makes long-range weapons usage a bit of a war in itself. These are the kinds of fundamental gameplay follies that can leave a gamer cold.

The Middle Path
You want to like this game?you really do?and every now and then, when the ?ber-cool ideas outmaneuver the sloppy execution, you?ll find that you actually can?especially later in the game, when battles become crazier and you?ve earned hyper-nifty weapons like the chain blade and Tri-Wind. New Legends could go down as one of the best bad games ever made.

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